Yes, Doctor
by mattmetzger
Summary: Leonard knows what it is to fall in love. Implied S/M.


**Notes: Inspired by a piece of original fiction that I'm currently working on, called A Discourse on Love. This is slightly odd, but I went ahead with it anyway.**

**Disclaimer: I do not own Star Trek 2009, and I make no profit from this work.**

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><p>You might talk to him about the benefits of being liberal with your emotions, but love has never followed the same rules as the other emotions, has it? You can soothe away anger, you can talk yourself out of sadness - or happiness - and you can even nurse yourself gradually out of hate.<p>

But love doesn't follow those rules.

Loves work in one of two ways, and you've seen them both now. Sometimes, it shows up in front of you in a flash car with gaudy clothing and presents itself, bold as brass, right in the middle of your day and plans and _life_, and never mind what you'd been thinking before, because here's _love_, and love is going to change everything.

Jocelyn was like that. She walked into the party and your heart walked out of your chest, because that's what that kind of love does. That's the removing kind of love - the kind of love that stands apart and beckons and your heart betrays you by wandering over and setting up residence with someone else's soul. Your heart cheats on you, and so love changes everything.

And you can't coax your heart back. Even if it does come back, by the time it does, you don't want it back. You want it to stay with her, with love, because if it comes back, it'll crawl back up into you broken and bleeding like a battered housewife in the clinic on a Friday night. It'll curl itself up under your ribs again and it'll _hurt_.

It's not a physical pain. It's not like breaking your leg. It's not even a mental pain, not like guilt or self-loathing, and you know those too. It's a special pain, because if love doesn't obey the rules, neither does the hole it leaves behind. Because your heart came back battered and incomplete, and she's still got part of it, and she always will. You'll never get that piece back, and so what's left _hurts_.

It's a strange hurt. In the beginning, it's there all of the time, but time has its own rules and eventually it fades away, only to blindside you again waking up alone in a starship cabin, miles from home, and wondering, just for a moment, if you can't smell her perfume in the room. And then your heart will stab itself on your ribs, and the hurt comes back like it's never been away.

That's removal love.

But the other kind of love...the other kind of love is worse.

You can't defend yourself again removal love, not unless you go around blind and deaf and isolated for your entire existence. Removal love will always be ready, waiting in the wings, and like death, it knows its time will come. One day, you'll have to open your eyes, and there they'll be - _somebody_, wrapped up in _love_, and you'll be lost.

But the other kind of love is worse.

The other kind of love is when that somebody gets inside you. They take up residence beside your heart, and wrap themselves around it, and hold it hostage. And that is even worse, because even if you walk away, you're dragging them with you and they'll always be there.

And they don't _appear_. They have to get _inside _you, first.

He did that one. He was always there, just a shadow in the background of your world, the understudy in the wings for the minor actor you never had to speak to. He didn't even do anything; he didn't _try _to get inside you like that. He probably didn't even notice you; you knew each other, and maybe you were friends in some strange fashion, but you didn't really notice one another.

And then once day love sat up and took notice, and said _oh don't you know...?_

It's the stupid things. A stupid love for stupid people - because he didn't do anything, but one day you looked up from whatever inconsequential thing you were doing, and he did something equally irrelevent and stupid like fold his arms or turn on his heel to leave the room or _speak_, and that was it.

One 'yes, doctor' and love sat up to notice.

Just like that, one tiny moment just like the thousands of other identical moments, and he stepped into your chest and slammed the door behind him and wound himself around your heart. And you want to hate him for doing it, except he did nothing. And you want to hate yourself for leaving the goddamn door open in the first place, but there's no point because when love appeared, snuck in with just the angle of the overheard lights or the specific tone of his voice, the door was wide open without your consent.

He didn't push, and you didn't pull, but somewhere he's gotten in, and you want to hate something for it but you _can't_.

And falling? Falling is the wrong term. You fall into removal love, but filling love? That is the kind of love where you stop dead in the middle of something else, and think _I am in love_. And that something will be nothing to do with it, but you'll realise all the same. And there you are: in love, held hostage by a man unwilling to be holding the gun, and love is laughing in the background.

You fell in love, and it walked away with a piece of you; you _became _in love, somehow and someway, and he slipped into the hole left behind and made a home there without ever wanting to at all.

Love has made a hostage of both of you, and there is nothing that either of you can do about it. You haven't fallen; it has simply _happened_, and when you look back, it might look like love lurked in the corners all alone, but she didn't.

She didn't exist at all, until one half-forgotten afternoon that he said, "Yes, Doctor." And suddenly she did.

You spent years building up the armour, and then love has pushed someone beyond the barriers all the same. And now your heart is hostage, once again, and the worst of it is that, really, deep down _in _that heart, you don't _want _to fight it.

And all he said was, "Yes, Doctor."


End file.
